“... clothes, he revels in self-multiplication: ‘Brother, that’s I; that sits for me. Do you mark it? And I must stand here ready to make away myself yonder – I must sit to be killed and stand to kill myself. I could vary it not so little as thrice over again. ’T’as some eight returns like Michaelmas term.’ The dark surreal farce of this moment ...”

“... in this book too. In her preface Kendall writes that as a cub critic in 1981 she was sent by the Ford Foundation to interview Balanchine, then 77 (he died two years later). Having finished her questions she prepared to leave – but no, he wanted to keep talking. He told Kendall of his life in 1920s revolutionary Petrograd, ‘tales about starving, and ...”

“... oddest ceremony in the history of the post-war White House was that devised by President Truman to mark the founding in 1946 of the CIG (forerunner of the CIA established in the following year). The President presented his guests with black cloaks, black hats and wooden daggers, then called his chief of staff forward and stuck a large black moustache firmly on ...”

“... much more nearly to that of literary criticism. Her comments on Arnold Bennett’s These Twain and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier acknowledge the presence of a medium as well as a message. There can be little doubt, however, that she enjoyed and still enjoys talking about content rather than form, and has no ...”

“... but the sheer coincidence of a Jacobean dramatist and a legendary director sharing the name John Ford. So perhaps it takes a formalist to know one. But the contemporary formalist whose approach converges most sharply on Herbert’s is the sculptor Cornelia Parker. For a piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker took a silver ...”

“... dared to write congratulating Leavis on his CH (‘Dead Sea fruit’, said his wife). Boris Ford was accused of killing Scrutiny off by stealing its contributors for the Penguin Guide to English Literature. Few friends, however loyal, escaped. Wilfrid Mellers, H.A. Mason and others all fell foul of him in one way or another. As to his enemies, the ...”

“... there was a star turn: a sharia-compliant leveraged buy-out of Aston Martin Lagonda, then part of Ford, and a glamorous accessory in the not so compliant 007 range. (The cars themselves are ‘compliant’, someone involved in the deal assured me.) For the purposes of the acquisition, two investment management companies in Kuwait formed a third company with ...”

“... North Korea’ with fire and fury was a rhetorically extreme example in a long record. Eisenhower, Ford and Clinton all made similar threats. In response to North Korean missile tests, the US twice fired conventional missiles from South Korea into the Sea of Japan. In 2019, it withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Trump administration ...”

“... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...”

“... him. Often, having the errors pointed out to him, he refused to sanction changes. This is a black mark against him? Not at all, says Ms Froula: the very fact that he refused revisions when these were offered shows that he repudiated for and in his poem any conception of human history as possessing a factual truth beyond the variously unreliable witnesses ...”

“... a blue vest, visibly tired after his incarceration, he still manages something of the flavour of Mark Rylance as ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. There is, he believes, an English Arcadia, between industrial dereliction and the willow beds, marshlands and reservoirs of the Lower Lea Valley. The opposition Wells personifies comes from ...”

“... explains why it’s occasionally mentioned in the play). One year I was also drafted in to help mark and interview candidates for the history scholarships. It didn’t seem all that long since I had been interviewed myself and I was nervous lest my marks would differ from those of my more experienced colleagues by whom I was every bit as intimidated as the ...”

“... He was introduced to the club by one of the key figures in both the Rand Corporation and the Ford Foundation, and a special arrangement was made that he get a new automobile every year at cost. Alvarez was on the board of IBM and he was one of the original directors of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation when it went public – again, courtesy of connections ...”

“... press corps dutifully reported the official Pentagon version of events. A US navy captain called Mark Hill, who was working on a project for McNamara, eventually let Hersh in on the real, catastrophic story. (Hill was one of the honourable soldiers on whom Hersh came to rely.) ‘I remember being angry, of course, but also more than a bit ...”

“... that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but ...”